by David Corn
from “The Nation”

One spoke to the heart. One spoke to the head. But both presidential candidates had the same mission: to prevent Senator Hillary Clinton from claiming the soul of their party.

On Tuesday, at the annual Take Back America conference–a three-day gathering in Washington, DC, of thousands of progressive activists–Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, each an aspirant for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, delivered back-to-back speeches that delineated the stark difference in their political courtship styles.

Obama went first. He started with his own story, talking about his days as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, when he was paid $12,000 a year by church groups to help establish job training and after’school programs in a neighborhood hit hard by a steel plant closing. He described his subsequent entry into local politics and decried a Washington dominated by special interests where “all you see…is another scandal, or a petty argument, or the persistent stubbornness of a President who refuses to end this war in Iraq.” Blasting lobbyists for oil and pharmaceutical companies, he exclaimed, “They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government, but we;re here to tell them it’s not for sale.”

That was a good applause line. The cynical ways of Washington, he said, are of no use to an Iowa couple he met who own a small business and cannot longer afford health care coverage. Pay-to-play politics in Washington, he pointed out, does not help the workers of Newton, Iowa, who lost their jobs when Maytag closed their plant and shipped their jobs overseas; nor does it do much for the still-homeless in New Orleans, the 45 million Americans without health insurance, and the 15 million American children living in poverty. “The time for the can’t-do, won’t-do, won’t-even-try style of politics is over,” Obama proclaimed. “It’s time to turn the page.”

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